The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) announced the launch of the Joint Cyber Defense Collaborative (JCDC) on Aug. 5, to combat increasing cyberattacks from other countries including communist China.
The JCDC will bring government agencies and private industry together to cooperate on U.S. cyber-defense operations to fend off cyberattacks and threats from overseas.
The private industry partners currently participating in the JCDC include Amazon Web Services, AT&T, Crowdstrike, FireEye Mandiant, Google Cloud, Lumen, Microsoft, Palo Alto Networks, and Verizon. It is believed that the JCDC will attract more partners from different sectors as it develops.
On the government side, participating agencies include the Department of Defense, U.S. Cyber Command, the National Security Agency, the Department of Justice, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and Sector Risk Management Agencies.
CISA Director Jen Easterly said in a prerecorded virtual keynote on Thursday at the Black Hat USA 2021 cyber security conference, “The JCDC presents an exciting and important opportunity for this agency and our partners – the creation of a unique planning capability to be proactive vice reactive in our collective approach to dealing with the most serious cyber threats to our nation.”
Easterly also said that the idea for the JCDC was from the Cyberspace Solarium Commission, a group created by Congress that includes lawmakers from both Democratic and Republican parties, along with the House and Senate Homeland Security panels.
In recent years, the United States has been subject to increasingly severe cyberattacks. Microsoft announced in March that a vulnerability in its Exchange server allowed a group of Chinese hackers to attack thousands of companies.
The U.S. Department of Justice named four Chinese hackers last month. Three of them were from the Chinese regime’s Ministry of State Security Hainan office, and the other was affiliated with a government agency front company called “Hainan Xiandun.” The four were accused of invading the computer systems of dozens of companies, universities, and governments in the United States and other countries from 2011 to 2018. They were charged with global computer intrusion campaigns targeting intellectual property and confidential business information, including infectious disease research and economic espionage.
